Post
by sjhillier » Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:17 pm
Interesting talk. For fun, some years ago (20ish!) I did a very naive analysis of the UK lottery to try to determine popular numbers. My results were not very strong, but there was certainly some indication of 1-30 being more popular. However, I noticed another trend that might be worth exploring.
At the time, the lottery slips were laid out in a grid of 5x10 numbers (1-5, 6-10, etc) up to 49. (It's a 6/49 lottery.) I'm not sure if the slips are still the same, as I haven't looked at them for about 20 years. I got the impression that the numbers at the edge of the grid were less popular, and in particular corner numbers, such as 46 and 49. This doesn't apply to the lower numbers which seem to be more popular anyway. But 46 and 49 seemed particularly unpopular, and to a lesser extent 31, 35, 36, 40, 41, 45, 47, and 48. Even amongst the numbers in the range 1-30, the side numbers were possibly marginally less popular. My assumption would be that people filling in a lottery choice without any prior ideas about what numbers to choose tend to gravitate towards the interior of the grid, and pick numbers on the edge of the grid less often. Would be interesting to see if this is still the case, but I don't have the time for that sort of thing nowadays!